Marked by relaxation, minimal hygiene, and expressing time in beers consumed rather than hours, the cottage lifestyle is a true slice of paradise.

Routines are nonexistent and unchecked hedonism rules. Whether the mood strikes you for anything from alcohol-addled lake fun-tivities to horror movie reenactments through forest intercoursing, there’s likely a means to satisfy any craving somewhere around the cottage.

For whatever reason today, you’re called to adventure. Perhaps it’s random chance or maybe it’s, more accurately, because you’ve just snapped off a wicked doody bomb in the lone bathroom and surmised that it’ll take several hours for the embarrassingly foul rancidity to dissipate. Regardless, you’re pushing hard for any sort of group outing.

Naturally an intoxicated canoe voyage is your best option. There’s nothing quite like uniting binge chugging and exhibitionism yet again, flaunting to the general public that even in a slow moving boat there’ll be no curbing your intoxicated belligerence. The trip’s not a tough sell. Within minutes everyone’s on board with your idea for a boozing river processional.

Drinks, paddles, and actual canoes are essentials—by definition, you can’t have a drunken canoe trip without them. Today they’re givens, like oxygen or not apologizing for offending strangers, and are too obvious to be listed any further.

Now by this juncture in your career in alcoholism any mention of “trip,” “excursion,” or “someone else is driving” should have you instinctively scrounging for a cooler (1). It doesn’t need to be fancy; a dirty shoebox or gently used garbage bag filled with ice can always work.

A well-stocked canoe cooler is a solid start but, unlike myself at the Olive Garden, canoes are capable of tipping. Therefore a drink saving apparatus or strategy (2) becomes a necessity.Depending on your dedication to pregaming and your current level of coordination, your system can be as simple as relying on reflexes and screaming at other people or as complicated as a Rube Goldberg-ian contraption of nets, pulleys, and hamsters running on wheels. Whatever it is, figure it out; losing alcohol is never acceptable.

Always be sure to secure a personal flask (3) to be used in case your drink-corralling tactics fail. Preparedness is key; accidents are bad, but sobering disasters are completely avoidable. Empty pockets (4) are crucial too. Your keys, your fancy phone, your wallet containing that lone expired condom, all of these are just things that you’ll likely break or lose on the river. You can go a few hours without checking social media; you’re not that popular.

Everyone drinks differently. Some are set when they’re sociably tipsy while others won’t stop until they’re in a blackout stupor and soliciting children for more booze and uppers. If you’re feeling you’re group shades closer to the latter end of that spectrum, a life jacket or two (5) might not be the worst idea. Strap them on the most incoherently unconscious few and you won’t have to worry about them passing out into the river. Nothing puts a wet blanket on a canoe trip quite like a preventable fatality.

Canoe trips, McRib Season, Michael J. Fox as the face of the Teen Wolf franchise, yes, all good things do eventually end. And unless you were dropped off or are traversing some paradoxical, M.C. Escher-type circular river, you’re eventually going to need a ride back (6). Whatever it is, figure it out ahead of time or prepare for a frustrating wait with a dwindling alcohol supply.

It’s pretty simple. After the essentials and a thirst for boozy adventure, all you really need is beverage protection, a way home, and a means to not die. Any thing more than that is just a silly fucking waste.